The world’s un­pre­dictable

Maarten Sier­huis, di­rec­tor of the Nis­san Re­search Cen­tre, said: ‘Rea­son­ing and learn­ing is not sim­ple. From the raw data, we need to per­ceive the world and un­der­stand the ob­sta­cles. It’s hard [for a ma­chine] to dis­tin­guish a hu­man stand­ing still from a lamp­post. Then the sys­tem needs to pre­dict what the ob­ject will do next and what ev­ery other ob­ject will do.’

Real-world driv­ing in­volves quick de­ci­sion mak­ing that would re­quire some ex­tremely so­phis­ti­cated pro­gram­ming. For in­stance, go­ing through a red light be­cause you’ve been waved through by a road­worker or a po­lice­man. ‘When you drive, how many times do you break the law in traic? More of­ten than you think.’

Draw­ing on his ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing with NASA, he be­lieves that you need to keep hu­mans in the loop, su­per­vised by some­thing like air traic con­trol.